Victor Hugo: Drawn to the Void - artist

France's 19th-century literary giant, exiled for two decades, cultivated a brooding but startlingly inventive graphic-art "avocation. "International shows are now bringing to light the full range of his proto-abstract experiments with technique and materials.

I'm very happy and very proud that you should choose to think kindly of what I call my pen-and-ink drawings. I've ended up mixing in pencil, charcoal, sepia, coal dust, soot and all sorts of bizarre concoctions which manage to convey more or less what I have in view, and above all in mind. It keeps me amused between two verses.

--Victor Hugo

Letter to Charles Baudelaire, Apr. 29,1860

It is probably a mistake, though a virtually inescapable one, to see the drawings of Victor Hugo (1802-1885) as an instance of modernism avant la lettre. Certainly the recent state-of-the-art installation of some 102 examples (out of roughly 3,000 extant) at the Drawing Center in New York seemed to invite comparisons with 20th-century visual artists rather than 19th-century belletrists. The selections in the admirably coherent "Shadows of a Hand" were grouped chronologically by technique, as for a formalist survey. In dim, conservatorially correct lighting, each work hung in splendid isolation--iconically remote not only from its companions in the exhibition but, more anachronistically, from the letters, manuscript pages, calling cards and albums that originally linked them to Hugo's daily world.

Given this French writer's reputation for self-aggrandizement, one can understand why the curators--Florian Rodari, a French-Swiss curator and critic, and Ann Philbin, the Drawing Center's then executive director--decided to limit the atmospherics to a few concise, informative text panels. The author was a prodigy of nature, a self-proclaimed prophet and seer, who manifested a glossolalia impressive even for his verbally immoderate age of thick volumes, lifelong diaries and incessant correspondence. Already prolific, and prize-winning, in his teens (when he also edited and largely ghostwrote a literary journal), Hugo went on to publish a Romantic manifesto, a seminal and riot-inducing play (Hernani), nine other dramas, 20 books of poetry, nine novels (including Notre Dame de Paris, Les Miserables and Les Travaileurs de la met), and a library's worth of ringing commentary on literature, politics and social issues. (His Oeuvres completes, including posthumous titles, run to 45 volumes.) He received the Legion d'honneur at the age of 23, entered the Academie francaise at 39 and was appointed a Peer of France at 44. In his spare time, he married and fathered five children, womanized compulsively ("imagination," he said, "is intelligence with an erection"), explored spirtualism, and served in the National Assembly and the Senate. When he died, his bier lay on public view under the Arc de Triomphe. After a state funeral, some two million mourners watched as his body was borne in a seven-hour procession down the Boulevard Saint-Germain (in a pauper's hearse per Hugo's instructions) toward its final rest in the Pantheon.

The drawings chosen for the show come from a graphically inventive 18-year period between 1847 and 1865 (when Hugo was aged 45 to 63), chiefly while the author was in exile (1852-1870) on the Channel Islands of Jersey and Guernsey. The son of one of Napoleon's career officers (later designated a general and count), Hugo went through several flamboyant political transformations--from monarchist (like his mother) to Bonapartist to liberal republican--and in the process was expelled from France by Napoleon III. While banished and refusing amnesty, Hugo experimented for about two years with table-turnings, Ouija boards and other arcana in the hope of communicating with his daughter Leopoldine, who had drowned in the Seine a decade earlier. In the course of these seances, he reportedly channeled many spirits--including Moses, Dante, Shakespeare, Christ, St. Augustine, the ocean, and death itself--before ceasing all such activity after a fellow participant went mad.

Given the troubled genesis of these drawings, one might well have expected a series of murky Romantic sketches--landscapes, seascapes, brooding architectural caprices--and, to a certain extent, this is exactly what Hugo produced. But his handling of even the most hackneyed Sturm-und-Drang motifs is, characteristically, at once extreme and subtle. Gloom, haze or fog partially obscures many vistas. A sideways light, welling from the distant horizon, picks out a lone half-ruined tower, a castle, an old fantastical city seemingly afloat in space (all, perhaps, emblematic self-portraits, as the show's excellent catalogue suggests). The angle of view is typically low, rendering the structures phallic and heroicized. The foregrounds are often punctuated by cliffs and shores--dark thresholds riddled with vaginal caves, arches and grottoes.

Amid this eroticized terrain, Hugo's cities rise up fretted with his beloved architectural embellishments (Notre Dame was but one of his many encomiums to the Gothic, whose physical preservation he advocated with fervor). The ancient gables and crannies, dark passageways and illogical juxtapositions are widely regarded as his metaphors for the rich accretions of human history and the unfathomable intricacies of the individual mind.